How can I speed up shopping online?
I cannot find a new release. Where is it?
How do I contact Fighting 15s?
Can I place an order by phone, fax, email or post?
What is the Collect at Show delivery option?

Can I obtain lists of your ranges?
Why haven't I received a reply to my email?
Why can't I log on to the Fighting 15s shop?
Why haven't I received confirmation of my order by email?
Why was my card payment rejected?

Why have I received a refund but not my order?
Does it really take eight weeks to get items that are out of stock or available to special order?
Do you make part-shipments?
Do you take PayPal?
Why was my PayPal payment rejected?

What is the WorldPay payment option?
I do not want to use my credit or debit card over the internet. What can I do?
How do I pay if I live in Europe and do not have a credit card?
Do you accept direct money transfers (IBAN)?
Do you offer discounts?

I am trying to fax an order, but your fax machine won't respond. What can I do?
I live outside the European Union. How do you handle Value Added Tax (VAT)?
Why can't I add more items to the shopping cart?
Can I add more items to my order once it has been placed?
What basis is used for calculating delivery charges?

Do you ship to painting services?
Can I order figures that appear on Eureka Miniatures' website but not on yours?
Can I order specific variants of figures?
Can I order Coat d'arms Paints that do not appear on the Fighting 15s website?
What happens if my order goes missing in the post?

What happens if I fail to collect an order from my sorting office?
Is Fighting 15s part of Eureka Miniatures?

How can I speed up shopping online?

Browsing through the hierarchical structure of categories and products can be slow, although it's the best way to organize how our products and ranges are presented.

If you are shopping for items in a particular range, then once you know the base codes you can use the Search function to have other options displayed.

For example, if you have one item from the AB Imperial French range in your cart, such as code AB-IF01, you can display other figures in that category by searching for AB-IF  and having all the results displayed in a list. You can further reduce the number of products displayed by searching for partial codes such as AB-IF0, AB-IF1, AB-IF2, or AB-IFC

Or in the shopping cart you can click on the product name of the item you last bought to be returned to that item, and then use the navigation line at the top to return to the category.

I cannot find a new release. Where is it?

Fighting 15s depends on advance release schedules from suppliers to be able to have new releases in stock when they are announced. We sometimes do not have sufficient information to add items to the shop in time for their release, and usually prefer not to add new items until we have stock available in the UK, and can assign the correct weight to calculate delivery charges. There may therefore be a delay between a supplier announcing a release and its addition to our online shop.

Eureka Miniatures' projects in the 100CLUB and 300CLUB lines are not available until they are officially released. Examples may well be seen on the internet and as preview releases at key wargames shows, but Fighting 15s will not have them in stock until they are officially released. Until then they are only available to those people who commissioned them through the 100CLUB and 300CLUB schemes. Please note that in a few instances it has taken several years for figures seen as previews to see the light of day as official releases. Figures that have yet to be released include Countess Sandra SYW women, the Jurassic Reich range, ECW vignettes, 18th century musicians (Frederick with flute, etc), Modern French Foreign Legion, and Russian SYW Pantomime Horse cavalry among others.

How do I contact Fighting 15s?

Our phone number is +44 (0) 1983 557852, and someone is usually available to take calls between 10am and 6pm on Mondays to Thursdays. This number is for enquiries only: orders should be placed in the online shop. Please try to avoid lunchtime: it may be a convenient time for you to call, but we may not be around to answer the phone. There is an answering service, but because Ian can't tell the difference between the ordinary dial tone and the messages waiting tone, messages can go unnoticed for some time.

Our fax number is +44 (0) 870 130 4999. This is an electronic fax service that can only receive. It does not always like receiving faxes from Italian phone exchanges.

Our email address is sales@fighting15sshop.co.uk

Our address is Green Butts, Colwell Road, Freshwater, Isle of Wight, PO40 9SL, United Kingdom. We can receive visitors only by arrangement and at the visitors' own risk.

Can I place an order by phone, fax, email, or post?

Internet sales placed through the shopping cart of our online shop account for 90 per cent of our business; most of the rest is direct sales at shows. The online shop takes payment at the point of ordering, and we fulfil these orders above all others because we have already taken the customer's money.

At our discretion we can accept orders by phone, fax, email or post only on the understanding that they are not a priority, compared with online orders, and that they therefore take time to process, typically two to eight weeks, depending on the volume of online sales. Fighting 15s no longer has paper lists of the ranges it stocks.

Orders for single figures that are not placed using the online shop are charged at single figure rates (for current rates, see Terms & Conditions).

Please bear in mind that a severe, long-term illness in Ian's family meant he had to focus on the core, internet-related sales of Fighting 15s over 2008 to 2009 to keep the business going during a difficult year. In that time, internet sales have grown to such an extent that Ian has not been able to continue the traditional mail-order side of the business, and as a result Fighting 15s has become what it initially set out to be: an internet-based business.

What is the Collect at Show delivery option?

This option allows customers to order online and collect their order at one of the wargames shows that Fighting 15s attends. It is usually enabled only for Salute.

Customers can pay in advance using a credit or debit card, or using Paypal. Customers can also pay in cash on the day, but need to select either the Pay by Cheque or the Telephone Payment option in the shopping cart. Customers who do not order through the online shop and who pay in advance by card or PayPal will be charged 4% of the order value to cover card processing costs.

Customers must choose the UK as their tax region for orders to be collected at a show.

Please note that if items are out of stock or cannot be obtained by Fighting 15s in time for a show, these items will not be placed on backorder. Orders will only be fulfilled with what is in stock; refunds will be made as appropriate for card and PayPal payments.

Can I obtain lists of your ranges?

We no longer provide lists of our ranges. The online shop is our sole list of codes.

Why haven't I received a reply to my email?

Replies are not usually sent to emails asking about stock levels because such advice can be out of date within a very short time. This is particularly true of AB Figures, for which turnover is high.

Any emails whose subject is in or contains Oriental or Cyrillic characters, or that have no subject heading and which contain an attachment are deleted automatically, unread, for security reasons. Please use a pertinent subject heading in English, for example, the name of the range in which you are interested, to avoid this happening.

Email is not a priority. Fighting 15s' priority is dealing with confirmed, paid for orders placed online and when necessary sorting stock from new shipments so we can fulfil these orders. Given those conditions, we answer emails when we can - but there may be a delay of several days.

Fighting 15s uses spam filters and although we do check the contents of the spam folder we can miss genuine emails from customers. 

We may well have replied to your email. However, some customers have their email accounts (particularly Hotmail or AOL) set to only receive email from approved senders, and it is not unusual for us to have answered an email only to find our reply has been rejected.

Why can't I log on to the Fighting 15s shop?

We have removed the need to create an account and therefore to log in when you buy anything from Fighting 15s. Customers therefore no longer need to remember a password to use the Fighting 15s shop.

We fully appreciate that regular customers may miss this feature because it means they must now type in delivery details each time, although this can be eliminated using a browser's form filling facility. We have removed the need to log in to make it easier for first-time and one-off customers to buy items.

Why haven't I received confirmation of my order by email?

There are several possible reasons. First, you may have entered your email address incorrectly. We see many instances of customers getting their own email addresses wrong. Common errors include using spaces rather than underscores, using the wrong ending (for example, using .com instead of .co.uk or vice versa), or missing off the end of the address.

Second, your email provider may have identified the message as spam and directed it to a spam folder. It's a sad fact that useful emails from online shops bear many similarities to spam emails, and anti-spam software isn't smart enough to tell the difference. Our confirmation emails come from sales@fighting15sshop.co.uk

Third, your email may be configured to accept mail only from people in your contact list and to reject any other emails (this particularly affects anyone with a Hotmail account). This not only blocks shop emails but also any emails from us, such as questions about your order or dispatch advice.

Fourth, you may not have completed the payment process. The shop therefore registers that the order has failed and does not send out an email. If you are presented with an option to return to the shop/merchant after completing payment, please select this option.

If you think you have successfully completed the payment process but have not received an email confirming your order, please get in touch. We can check and confirm whether payment has been accepted, and advise on the status of your order.

Why was my card payment rejected?

Your card may not be one that is accepted by our main payment processor, RBS WorldPay. Fighting 15s can accept payment only from card types whose logo appears on the front page of the shop. Our agreement with WorldPay does not let us take card payments using American Express; to use Amex you must choose the PayPal payment option.

The link between your card issuer and our payment processor may be down. Unfortunately, payment services are not necessarily available 24 hours a day. Our advice is therefore to try again later or to phone us with payment details.

Security software on the shopper's computer, predominantly in the workplace, is the commonest reason why most payments are rejected. Try using a home computer if a work computer doesn't let you order. Once you proceed to the payment pages, details of the contents of orders are recorded by the online shop, so in the event of being unable to pay online you can simply phone Fighting 15s with payment details and we should be able to locate your order and process it.

If you have paid using a card and have a PayPal account, payment may fail if the country in your address does not match the country registered to your PayPal account.

Why have I received a refund but not my order?

Other than when a customer asks us to cancel an order and make a refund, Fighting 15s typically issues a refund for one of three reasons:

First, we have dispatched an order but it has been returned to us some weeks later by the postal service because the customer has not taken delivery of the order.

Second, we have dispatched an order that has subsequently gone missing in the post and for which the customer has chosen an uninsured or unregistered delivery option.

In both the above instances, Fighting 15s will have taken payment either automatically in the shop at the time of placing an order or manually on the day of dispatch. Fighting 15s aims simply to return the customer's money as soon as possible.

Third, for any order where the issuing country of the payment card does not match the address of the customer, we automatically cancel the order and refund the payment. A mismatch of countries may potentially indicate a fraudulent transaction, and this is the biggest reason why Fighting 15s has lost money on transactions.

Does it really take eight weeks to get items that are out of stock or available to special order?

Fighting 15s has a policy of getting deliveries from suppliers as cheaply as possible, and that usually means slower, more infrequent deliveries in order to reduce shipping costs.

For example, Fighting 15s buys in bulk from Eureka Miniatures. Eureka builds up our orders until they reach the 30kg maximum for our courier's standard shipping box, and then ships what comprises several of our orders in one go. It can take eight or more weeks to build orders to the level where Eureka ships. Fighting 15s works this way to keep shipping costs, and therefore figure prices, as low as possible.

If Fighting 15s runs out of stock of a particular code in a short period, it will therefore take eight or more weeks to get stock back up to its previous levels. We usually have good stocks of most figures, and nowadays it is rare for an order to take eight weeks - but it can still happen.

Holiday periods, particular during August, and at Christmas and New Year, can greatly affect delivery times from our suppliers for up to two months afterwards.

Unfortunately, the have-it-now mentality of the internet age means that some customers cannot wait. We recommend that they pursue the expensive, faster option by purchasing direct from Eureka, and pay import tax and handling fees on their orders when their orders enter the country. Eureka will probably be able to complete a direct, small order within about two weeks. Please note that Eureka's minimum delivery charge for international orders is AUD14.00 (about GBP8.50, as of 30 March 2010), and that therefore even a small order that is below the VAT threshold for imports will be far more expensive bought direct from Eureka compared with buying from Fighting 15s.

Do you make part-shipments?

When possible, we ship an order in its entirety. If we know an item is due back into stock soon, because it is due in on a consignment from a supplier, we will typically delay dispatch of an order until that consignment arrives.

If the value of figures ordered is under GBP20.00 and we do not have all the required figures, we will typically delay dispatch until all items are available.

Otherwise, we make part shipments only if three criteria are fulfilled: if the bulk of an order is available to send immediately; if only a small proportion of the order needs to follow later; and if it is economical for Fighting 15s to do so. You will be advised on dispatch if this is the case. Subject to the limitations of ordering from suppliers in bulk, we really do try to get orders to customers as soon as we can.

Do you take PayPal?

We can take payment by PayPal. PayPal's strength is that we do not see customer's payment details and therefore have no access to credit card numbers, bank details or their PayPal account.

Note that the PayPal system charges for an order the moment it is placed in the shop, regardless of whether an item is in stock or whether it is only available to special order.

PayPal echeque payments (payments funded through a bank account rather than PayPal funds) take seven to nine days to clear, with a corresponding delay in the dispatch of an order.

Why was my PayPal payment rejected?

Your payment may be rejected by PayPal if your registered address for PayPal is different from the delivery address, particularly if the delivery address is in another country. This is a security decision by PayPal and we cannot do anything about it. You will need to pay for your order using a different method, or have a PayPal account that is registered to the delivery address.

What is the WorldPay payment option?

RBS WorldPay is our preferred card payment processor, and is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland. WorldPay acts as a secure third party, processing card payments on a secure site. As a result Fighting 15s does not see a customer's payment details, making it a safe internet payment system: customers entrust their payment details to a UK bank, not the retailer.

The disadvantage of this system is that Fighting 15s cannot add items to an order once it is placed because we do not have the details necessary to charge for them. The WorldPay system also charges for an order the moment it is placed in the shop, regardless of whether an item is in stock or whether it is only available to special order.

Customers who pay by credit card over the phone or by mail order obviously entrust us with their payment details, which we process using Worldpay's secure online payment system.

I do not want to use my credit or debit card over the internet. What can I do?

The shopping cart has an option to pay by telephone, allowing customers to place an order online but ring through their payment card details.

Fighting 15s, however, must point out that if customers ring through their credit card details, we use an internet-based terminal to process the payment, and that therefore the card details are sent over the internet. What's more, you trust us to dispose of your card details securely. It is in our opinion far safer to use third-party gateways such as PayPal or RBS WorldPay so that we at Fighting 15s never see your credit card details.

How do I pay if I live in Europe and do not have a credit card?

Most European post offices can issue a eurogiro cheque (see www.eurogiro.com for outlets). Eurogiro cheques should be made payable to Fighting 15s. You can order online and should choose the option to pay by cheque. Our shop will therefore record the order, and all you need to do is get to a post office and arrange the eurogiro cheque. Your post office acts as an agent: the cheque is issued by Alliance & Leicester Bank in the UK, and arrives by UK domestic post.

To arrange a eurogiro cheque, you will need Fighting 15s' address and the total amount of the order.

If you do not want to entrust your credit card details to online shopping systems, a eurogiro cheque is the ideal payment option (see www.eurogiro.com for agents in your country).

Do you accept direct money transfers (IBAN)?

No. The charges imposed by UK banks make such money transfers uneconomic for us.

Do you offer discounts?

Fighting 15s often gets asked if it offers discounts. The short answer is no. The long answer is no, because Fighting 15s offers most imported figures at less than the price they should be when operating on standard distributor margins.

For example, Fighting 15s currently charges £1.85 including VAT for a standard Eureka 28mm foot figure. Eureka charges AUD2.95 ex tax, or about £1.79* based on the exchange rate that Fighting 15s currently gets on its shipments. Fighting 15s gets a distributor's discount of 50%, so the cost of that figure to Fighting 15s is about £0.90. Delivery charges add to this, accounting for another 12% on average for shipping in bulk, taking the overall cost of one 28mm foot figure to about £1.00. In theory, Fighting 15s as distributor should then double the price to provide a 50% margin, making it £2.00, and with VAT at 17.5% the retail price should therefore be £2.35 including tax.

Instead, Fighting 15s charges a reasonable price some 22% lower than it should be, and which is broadly comparable with online prices in Australia once tax is taken into the equation. Fighting 15s relies on volume of sales to make up for the lower prices.

For example, Fighting 15s charges the equivalent of 60p per foot figure for 15mm AB Figures bought in a pack of eight. The AUD 0.91 cost from Eureka equates to a cost of about 27.5p* to Fighting 15s, which shipping at 12% takes to about 31p. Fighting 15s should charge 62p plus VAT, or about 73p per foot figure. Indeed, for special requests using single-figure codes, Fighting 15s charges the full price of 75p for single 15mm AB Figures imported from Australia. Figures in packs are therefore 18% cheaper than they should be.

Customers who buy online through Fighting 15s shop therefore get their figures at lower prices than they should be. Fighting 15s recognises that imported items can be expensive, and aims to keep prices within the reach of customers in the UK and EU.

Of course, customers can go direct to try to make savings. Eureka, however, charges a minimum of AUD14.00 for delivery based on Australia Post's minimum charges for small packets. That's about £8.50*. Keeping below the VAT threshold of £18.00 order value (about AUD29.70) will buy almost 33 x 15mm AB Figures or 10 x 28mm Eureka figures. With an overall cost including delivery, that equates to a cost of 80p per AB Figure or £2.65 per 28mm foot figure. Delivery charges at Fighting 15s work out at £2.89, making for far lower equivalent costs per figure: in fact, Fighting 15s would have to increase single figure prices to 70p for 15mm AB foot figures, and £2.46 for 28mm Eureka foot figures before direct prices become equivalent.

Beyond £18.00 of order value, of course, going direct should attract VAT and a handling charge of £8 for collecting that VAT, making figures in typically sized orders even more expensive.

Fighting 15s can never be as quick as Eureka when it comes to obtaining figures that have gone out of stock in the UK. However, Fighting 15s can offer a better price. Please do not be offended if Fighting 15s refuses requests for a discount.

*Exchange rates figured at the time of writing (28 July 2010), based on actual costs of shipments to Fighting 15s from Australia including commission charges.

I am trying to fax an order, but your fax machine won't respond. What can I do?

We do not have a fax machine but instead use a fax service that sends us faxes as encrypted emails. Callers from some countries' telephone exchanges may not be able to fax successfully - this particularly affects callers from Italy. There is nothing we can do about this. Please submit your order by post.

I live outside the European Union. How do you handle Value Added Tax (VAT)?

VAT at 17.5% applies only to goods sent to destinations in the European Union (EU). If you live outside the EU and we send your goods to an address outside the EU, then VAT is deducted from our prices. The shopping cart handles this automatically when you pick the appropriate tax region.

Customers who live outside the EU but want items delivered within the EU, for example to a figure painter, must pay VAT. We need proof of posting that shows an item is sent to an address outside the EU if we are not to charge VAT.

If VAT is due on your order and somehow you manage not to pay it in the shopping cart, we will email to advise you. If the due amount of tax is not paid, quantities in your order will be adjusted so that the correct tax is paid.

Why can't I add more items to the shopping cart?

The shopping cart has a limit of about 40 items. Internet shopping carts are not necessarily geared to the needs of wargamers!

If you want to order more items than the cart allows, please email your extra requirements. Please note that because the Worldpay payment system hides customers' card details from us, you will also need to contact us to pay the balance of the order - we most commonly arrange this via PayPal.

Can I add items to my order once it has been placed?

No, you will need to make another order in the online shop.

What basis is used for calculating delivery charges?

Fighting 15s aims to charge a fair rate for delivery without using delivery charges to make a profit.

Postage is calculated based on the weight of items ordered. Each item in the shop is assigned a weight in multiples of 10 grammes (the minimum we can apply to an item, and the increment by which weights rise). Because many wargames figures weigh less than 10g, or fall awkwardly between multiples of 10g, we typically group figures in packs of 4s or 8s to get the fairest weight per shop item.

Any airmail order of 500g or more is automatically charged to be sent by registered post. Any UK order of 750g or more is automatically charged to be sent by special delivery or insured parcel. UK orders worth £30.00 or more but which weigh less than 750g are usually sent by recorded delivery.

Paper flags are zero-weighted. You can order as many as you like and the delivery charge won't change.

The total weight as calculated by the shop determines where the order falls in terms of the Royal Mail's weight banding for large letters or small packets. We allow 50g per order for the weight of packaging. For typical UK orders, postage actually works out around 10% of order value, but this percentage decreases as order sizes increase. Charging by weight, rather than a fixed percentage, is the fairest means of determining postage, and the shopping cart is pretty accurate.

For mail order, however, if the buyer pays by cheque we use typical percentages as the basis for delivery charges coupled with a minimum delivery charge: this is the easiest way for such customers to work out the appropriate delivery charge.

VAT applies to delivery charges for items sent to addresses within the EU. Even though postage itself is exempt from VAT, the tax must be applied to a business's delivery charges based on the VAT rate appropriate to the items sent.

Do you ship to painting services?

For established customers we will ship direct to painting services in the UK by arrangement, although we will not specially sort figures within these orders. Please note that we require confirmation from the painting service that it is expecting your order.

We do not ship to painting services outside the UK, partly because of the implications in the event of a lost parcel, and partly because it will usually work out cheaper for customers to use one of our suppliers to ship direct as doing so reduces the impact of import taxes and VAT. Please note that Fernando Enterprises  of Sri Lanka (www.miniaturelovers.com) does not accept orders shipped direct from manufacturers.

Can I order figures that appear on Eureka Miniatures' website but not on yours?

Provided that the figures are from Eureka Miniatures' own ranges, or from the 15mm range of AB Figures, you can order almost any figure. Except for a few codes, which we do not stock nor obtain from Eureka, the reason why they are not on Fighting 15s' website is simply that we didn't know they were missing. Eureka's range is huge and in populating our own site we may have overlooked the odd code.

We will not order in or supply, nor enter into discussion about, the following codes: 100DANxx, 300NFR05, 300NFR06, 300CMW67. These items are too fragile to survive shipping in bulk, and because of the high proportion of breakages we will not obtain them for customers.

Exceptionally low demand in the EU for figures in the 28mm Empire of the Petal Throne range from Eureka Miniatures mean it is uneconomic for us to hold sufficient stocks to cater for all potential orders, and therefore as of 1 November 2009 we have decided to supply figures from this range only to special order. To place an order for these figures with Fighting 15s, please use the codes from Eureka's own website and place your order with us by email or by phone: we will calculate the cost of your order and advise of an expected delivery time.

Can I order specific variants of figures?

All figures are picked at random. Our mix of variants depends entirely on what is supplied by the manufacturer and we may not have a particular variant or even all variants of a figure in stock.

We cannot guarantee to supply a specific variant, even if a customer provides a picture of it. We cannot guarantee to provide all variants of a figure even if a customer orders a number of figures equal to the number of variants.

We cannot accept orders that are conditional on the supply of particular variants, and therefore ignore such requests.

Can I order Coat D'arms Paints that do not appear on the Fighting 15s website?

Fighting 15s stocks the full range of Coat D'arms water-based acrylic paints, and all these are available on the website. We do not stock or sell Coat D'arms solvent-based aerosol paints. According to Royal Mail regulations it is illegal to send solvent-based paints or aerosols by post, and courier charges from our location on the Isle of Wight mean that it is not not financially viable to use the few services that will carry aerosols or solvent-based paints.

What happens if my order goes missing in the post?

We replace orders that go missing without quibble if they have been sent by insured or registered post. We refund the value of a missing order if that order has been sent by unregistered post. If an unregistered order is refunded, you need to place your order again but using a registered delivery option otherwise Fighting 15s  will decline the order.

We cannot process claims for missing parcels in the UK until 15 days have elapsed from the date of dispatch. We cannot process claims for missing parcels to destinations outside the UK until 25 days have elapsed. These limits are set according to Royal Mail claim requirements for pursuing claims for lost parcels.

Most of the time missing parcels have not gone missing. They invariably turn up at local sorting offices because an attempt has been made to deliver, but the recipient has not been at home. Although recipients should be advised that an attempted delivery has been made, these delivery advice cards can go astray. We recommend that customers check first with their local sorting office (not post office) in case a parcel is being held for them.

International orders can sometimes accidentally go by surface mail, in spite of their airmail labels. Such orders will typically take six or more weeks to arrive.

If we have gone out of stock of an item in a missing parcel, we regret that it will probably take at least eight weeks before we are able to send replacements.

If orders go missing, we require affected customers to use registered delivery options for all subsequent orders.

What happens if I fail to collect an order from my sorting office?

Customers typically have one week to collect an order from their local sorting office if it cannot be delivered. If the order is not collected it is eventually returned to us by the postal service. Fighting 15s refunds the value of the order when the postal service returns the order to us using the automated refund option for our payment processor. This process can take three or more weeks.

For most orders placed in the shop it is not economic for us to pay postage again for an order that has not been collected. Transaction charges mean that it is not economically worthwhile to send an order again even if the customer pays additional postage. We therefore refund the value of an order that is returned to us because it is the least costly solution. Affected customers will need to re-order the figures.

Is Fighting 15s part of Eureka Miniatures?

Fighting 15s imports and sells wargames figures made by Eureka Miniatures of Australia. The two companies are separate, independent businesses: Fighting 15s is not, therefore, a subsidiary of Eureka Miniatures.